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Developer Ryan Hanna built Sworkit, now owned by Nexercise, with only five months of coding experience. “I like the the mentality of code what you know, and learn what you don’t along the way,” says Hanna.

Sworkit is a fitness app that provides bodyweight workouts that can be done anywhere, for users at all levels of fitness experience.

“It can even be used to create custom workouts that aid in injury recovery or meet other specific needs,” Hanna adds. “Sworkit thrives on eliminating all excuses for not working out, requiring no gym membership, subscription plan, or equipment, and only needing a minimal amount of space.”

Users choose a strength building, cardio, stretching, or yoga workout and enter the amount of time they have available to work out. Sworkit provides interval timing and sequencing, along with rewarding users and tracking their progress.

Originally developed using jQuery Mobile, Sworkit was in need of an update when the development team learned about Ionic in blog posts by Holly Schinsky of Adobe and Christophe Coenraets of Salesforce.

“Ionic levels the playing field for hybrid developers by offering components and templates on par with those to which native developers have access,” says Hanna. “We were able to jump directly into creating beautiful views and focus on the app’s actual logic. Ionic takes you past the complications of building apps for hundreds of devices and is focused on cross-browser support and performance optimization from the beginning. This allows you to focus on creating the app you want and to move forward quickly.”

“The complete redesign and refactoring of the apps was completed in just ten weeks,” says Hanna. “Most importantly, the response from our users has been amazing, and they love the new design and layout and are even more engaged than before.”

Since switching to the Ionic Framework, Apple contacted Hanna and Sworkit Pro was featured in the Health and Fitness section of the App Store. The Sworkit and Sworkit Pro apps have been downloaded over 25 million times from the iOS App Store and Google Play.

“Hybrid development allowed a single developer to create apps for iOS and Android on the same exact schedule,” says Hanna. “If there had been a decision to only focus on one native platform and release just that one, a massive part of the market would be left out. There would be no way real way to grow that audience and for users to share the app with all of their friends and family.”

“Ionic for us is the framework that has finally leveled the playing field with native development,” Hanna adds. “Having access to a similar set of components that native developers are accustomed to and having a focus on beautiful, optimized elements is incredible.”